Vinny Lingham’s Blog

• Yahoo!: Time for Plan B – SeekingAlpha
• Yahoo’s Terry Semel: Call For His Head
• Poll: Was Google Apps Premier The Web Office Tipping Point?
  Take the poll!

• OpenID For Idiots | Mike Stopforth
  We’ll be using OpenID in Synthasite shortly…
• Official Google Blog: Google Apps grows up
  I’ve already signed up for a premier account – it’s pretty impressive.
  (tags: Google business office web2.0 apps Calendar)

For those of you who believe that financial betting markets offer the best predictive capabilities around outcomes – Betfair is by far the largest and most accurate. Unfortunately, the Oscars is voted on by Hollywood glitterati.

By comparison, the Hollywood Stock Exchange (virtual game with virtual money “investing” in movie outcomes, Oscars, etc), they also have a similar prediction system.

I compared the two markes to see who the winner would be. It’s remarkable that both markets agreed on the winners of the awards for the categories that they both had. Here is a quick roundup of who the predicted winners of tonight’s Oscars are, by category and Market. I’ll follow up this post with the actual winners and see how each market scored. I’m only using the markets that Betfair allowed bets in, so some categories are not included and in other HSX had no markets open.

Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat“, really resounded with me this weekend.  I was reading a post by Mike Stopforth on some of South Africa’s top bloggers, where he regarded me as one of them and did a quick traffic comparison with Alexa.  I proceeded to review my weblogs, and although technically, this may be true, only about 3% of my traffic is from South Africa – primarily because our business focus is global and there is a lot more traffic internationally by comparison.  Also, given that my site is hosted in the USA, my entries don’t even show up in Google.co.za (I need to get around to fixing this – any suggestions?).

• SA Blog Awards – 2007
  Don’t forget to vote for your favourite blog! (Nudge nudge wink wink)
• The MyBlogLog Blog: Everybody hurts… sometimes
  If you have not been following the MyBlogLog fiasco, it’s over anyway
• 9 Random Tips On Being A Successful Online Marketer – ShoeMoney™
• Visit MIX07 – See you in Vegas
  I have been invited by Microsoft to attend this event in Las Vegas – looking very forward to it.
• Cleaning up the mess over at MyBlogLog
  Here’s another piece on this story